All right, thank you for coming. You told me on Sunday that the only way to talk to you at Davos was going to be on a chairlift, so that's true. I really appreciate this. It was my 11th Davos, which is more than some of you but not as many as some. And I finally cracked the code, which is we flew a big portion of the US ski team in and then took customers skiing. So if anyone thinks that sounds fun, become a Cloudflare customer and we'll take you next year. And I'm still sore from trying to keep up with you. I do have a security question for you. You are a security guy. I spent some time in the Gulf and learned I was fascinated to learn about all of the security requirements that these big data centers that have accelerated compute, like in Abu Dhabi for one, are the US government putting these requirements on them that are just really intense. And I thought I'd ask you, what are the challenges do you think to securing these things, to stopping like IP from being, you know, say stolen by China?
You know, I think that Cloudflare runs one of the world's largest networks. Huge percentage of the internet sits behind our network. We're in more than 600 data centers around the world, so we've seen every version of security that is out there. And I think from our perspective, it's great when we can go into an extremely highly secure facility, but we need to also be able to go into facilities that aren't as secure. And so we actually think about security down to the individual chipset level on every machine we have, because we assume that someone will drive a truck through a wall and rip out a bunch of servers, and that's something that we have to be able to protect for. I think that some of these protections that are being imposed by the US government in order to be able to send high powered GPUs and other things overseas again have some sense, there's something that's real there, but the physical security of a building is never something that we're going to individually rely on. That's one of the last sort of steps of defense. I think you actually have to design your systems in such a way that even if a USB drive gets plugged into a server, and again on our servers we don't even have USB drives or USB connections to them, even if a hard drive gets ripped out, even if an entire server gets stolen, you have to have that security all the way down to the chipset level. And that's how we think about it, not only in the Gulf but everywhere we operate.
What one idea that I've heard bounced around, you probably heard this too, is to put some sort of requirement to have like a remote kill switch on these GPUs. Do you think that's a good idea? Would that work?
You know, I'm not sure how exactly that would happen, although we've done something similar. So we had data centers in Russia, we were data centers in Ukraine, and in 2022 when the Russian invasion happened into Ukraine, we actually triggered what was the global kill switch which bricked all of the servers that we had in areas that we thought might be captured. And again, I think thinking about those things makes a ton of sense. Whether that's something that should be imposed by the US government or not, that's where I think that we might get lost. But I think smart companies like Cloudflare, like a company like Salesforce, are thinking about how they can make sure that their infrastructure will be secure no matter what happens in the rest of the world.
Yeah, what do you think about the Gulf region in general? It's become strategically important. The growth in technology there has been absolutely insane. Are you sort of bullish on it or what are the challenges you see?
You know, I think first of all, the Gulf is made up of a number of different nations, and those nations each have different personalities, different strengths and weaknesses. But I think if you look at the region as a whole and you think about AI, the sort of three unique advantages that I think people are listing, and they list them in this order of priority, my hunch is that it's actually backwards in terms of the priority that's there. First, there's a ton of capital. So there's an enormous amount of capital, there's a willingness to deploy that capital, and these tend to be very expensive capital projects, especially when you're thinking about model training. And so you have Sam at OpenAI saying we're going to need multi-trillion dollar projects. This is one of the places in the world where you could actually imagine that something that's there. I think the second advantage is that you have cheaper energy, or you have the potential to access cheaper energy, and not just because of the petrochemical resources that are there but also in terms of solar, in terms of wind. There's an enormous ability to actually generate that energy that a lot of the current generation of AI systems absolutely require. So I think that's an advantage. I think the third, which people have talked about a little bit less, is at least in some Gulf nations there is a willingness to be experimental in terms of regulation. There's a willingness to think about how you can build regulation to support industry. My hunch is if the history books are written about this 50 years from now, if the Gulf becomes the preeminent area for AI, it's actually going to be that experimentation around regulation which will probably turn out to be the thing that is hugely beneficial and really enables it, or potentially if they do it wrong holds that space very much back.
Speaking of that, there was a venture capitalist who had floated this idea of having a who operates in the Middle East, of having sort of one of these economic zones like a sandbox where there would be zero copyright law. And this is something I think you've gotten really interested in. I think you've talked about maybe some sort of blocking tracking of news sites and things like that. How do you feel about that?
You know, I think that there are two different regulatory models that are going to emerge. One is going to be a regulatory model to try and encourage the AI model builders to exist in a particular region. And again, something like saying we'll limit, we won't enforce copyright for models, that is the sort of thing that you could see at least certain AI companies finding very attractive. The other model that is going to emerge is I think people who are trying to protect content and say that if your content is actually delivered from this region, we're going to make sure that you have that protection that is there. My hunch is that's going to be less of what happens in the Gulf; it's going to be much more around the model builders. I think Europe you're going to see more protection on things like if you're scraping content, you have to actually declare what it is that you've scraped, you have to actually give people the ability to control that scraping. I think that's super important. And over the long term, it's going to be equally in both the model builders' and the content creators' interest for content to have value, otherwise we won't create original content. But I do think that's going to be sort of two different regulatory frameworks that will emerge.
Your data centers, like the old kind of data center with CPUs, they don't really do much for spreading technology when you put them somewhere. They just sort of go there, it seems right. They don't create a halo effect. But will these accelerated ones be different, do you think?
You know, I guess I would push back on that. I think that if you can make the internet faster anywhere, people use it more. And so much of the internet historically has been served out of either Ashburn, Virginia in the United States or the Dalles in Oregon. And so when you are far away from those places, you are at an inherent disadvantage. And the power of Cloudflare's network is actually we put content everywhere and are able to deliver it. We're seeing the same thing with AI. As we are putting GPUs across our entire network, what was really powerful is that people are turning to that in order to actually run models locally. And that's important for a couple of different reasons. Yes, performance matters, but actually you want models to speak as if they are local. So silly example: if you're in the US and you ask an AI system 'what color is something?' and it responds back and says 'it's colur,' then it's going to feel incredibly foreign. If you're in the UK on the other hand and you ask it 'what color something?' and it spells it 'color,' it's going to feel incredibly foreign. And so as we are building these systems that have personality, making sure that they are answering from a local place that understands the difference in spellings but also the difference in cultural sensitivities, the difference in what is expected for that region is incredibly important. And that's why we think that a lot of AI is actually going to be run on your own individual device, but when the model is too big or needs more resources, the next best place to run it is going to be on a network like Cloudflare.
That's interesting. Do you, to March of last year you launched this firewall for AI. Can you kind of explain that concept and how that's going since you launched?
